Geir Uvsløkk’s L’écriture des perversions is the first Norwegian doctoral thesis on the work of the French, twentieth century writer Jean Genet (1910-1986). The thesis is written in French, and its main topics are Evil, masculine identity and poetic language in Genet’s early prose works (1942-1949). The author questions a widely acknowledged point of view in most research on Genet, which claims that the writer’s early prose works are characterised by a lack of will to communicate, a foreclosure of the Other, and – as a conclusion of this – a direct, frontal, attack on the society he is addressing in his writings. Uvsløkk’s intention is not to completely overthrow this point of view. He discusses the inherent problems of such hypotheses, which only present one side of the story. For even though Genet in his early prose works glorifies criminals and the “real men” (the dominant ones, those who are “the active part” in homosexual and heterosexual intercourses), his burlesque presentations of these men, and those of the “weaker men” (transvestites, beggars, prostitutes etc. – who finally are even more praised than the sublimated hard core criminals), can also be considered as an attack on western society’s conventional moral and sexual role patterns. By constant derisions and questioning, Genet debilitates the well defined classical conceptions of Good and Evil, as well as established sexual domination-submission relations. In the first chapter, entitled “indétermination générique”, Uvsløkk stresses the difficulty of accommodating Genet’s early prose works with traditional literary genres, in order to elucidate the role of the narrative instance in the texts. In the next three chapters – entitled “perversions morales”, “perversions sexuelles” and “perversions textuelles” – he analyses Genet’s moral, sexual and textual perversions, and shows that the writer’s argumentation regularly evolves in two phases, following two very different, but complementary (or even inseparable) strategies. First Genet uses a perverse strategy, in which he constructs absolute opposites, imitating and mocking the established point of view of the bourgeois society by reversing traditional bourgeois values. Then he deconstructs these opposites, dissolving thus the foundations of bourgeois morality. Hence, Genet’s writing exceeds traditional dialectics. By portraying the lives and the lifestyle of transvestites, male prostitutes, beggars and criminals, Genet provides us with a new and more balanced idea of Evil and shows us suppressed aspects of masculine identity. Orphan, outlaw and openly homosexual, Genet has for decades been considered as a typical counter culture writer. Yet, he is not just an outcast writing on outcasts… he is, actually, writing about all of us.